AMD’s next-gen APU, codenamed Kaveri, won’t be coming to market this year. Although AMD plans to launch and ship the chip toward the end of the year, it won’t appear in the channel until February 2014.
Earlier this week tech site VR Zone reported that Kaveri would be delayed, which was no surprise as few people expected it to show up this year. AMD’s roadmap indicates that the chip is indeed launching this year, but in its response AMD has now officially confirmed that availability is expected in early 2014.
Kaveri is AMD’s fourth generation mid-range APU. It will pack up to four Steamroller CPU cores and it will be the first AMD APU to feature GCN graphics. The previous two generations were 32nm parts based on Piledriver CPU cores and WLIW4-based GPUs, hence the 28nm Kaveri with a brand new CPU and GPU cobmo looks like a huge upgrade.
Mobile Kaveri chips should start shipping later in 2014, AMD said.
It should be noted that the new chips will require FM2+ compatible motherboards and the first boards were launched by Asus a few weeks ago. Although they are backwards compatible with FM2 parts, they don’t appear to be a worthwhile investment at this point. There is still plenty of time to stock up on FM2+ boards before Kaveri shows up.
